y magnolias, whose cloying
fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer
days; then dress-parade and a little drill as the day grew cool. In the
evening, tea; and then the piazza or the fireside, as the case might
be,--chess, cards,--perhaps a little music by aid of the assistant
surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean Paul's "Titan," almost my
only book, and carefully husbanded,--perhaps a mail, with its infinite
felicities. Such was our day.

Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound. The
darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the
pickets. The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new
labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift
and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly
baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse. Riding
beneath the solemn starlight, or soft, gray mist, or densest blackness,
the frogs croaking, the strange "chuckwuts-widow" droning his ominous
note above my head, the mocking-bird dreaming in music, the great
Southern fireflies rising to the tree-tops, or hovering close to the
ground like glowworms, till the horse raised his hoofs to avoid them;
through pine woods and cypress swamps, or past sullen brooks, or
white tents, or the dimly seen huts of sleeping negroes; down to the
glimmering shore, where black statues leaned against trees or stood
alert in the pathways;--never, in all the days of my life, shall I
forget the magic of those haunted nights.

We had nocturnal boat service, too, for it was a part of our
instructions to obtain all possible information about the enemy's
position; and we accordingly, as usual in such cases, incurred a great
many risks that harmed nobody, and picked up much information which did
nobody any good. The centre of these nightly reconnoissances, for a
long time, was the wreck of the George Washington, the story of whose
disaster is perhaps worth telling.

Till about the time when we went on picket, it had been the occasional
habit of the smaller gunboats to make the circuit of Port Royal
Island,--a practice which was deemed very essential to the safety of our
position, but which the Rebels effectually stopped, a few days after our
arrival, by destroying the army gunboat George Washington with a single
shot from a light battery. I was roused soon after daybreak by the
firing, and a courier soon came dashing in with th